


for the longest time

by spaceburgers



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 16:02:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7721062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceburgers/pseuds/spaceburgers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not a big deal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for the longest time

**Author's Note:**

> i read lionheart and experienced Emotions
> 
> scroll down to the endnotes for me talking about characterization and stuff, otherwise feel free to ignore

The thing that Izumi is the most impressed with, quite frankly, is the fact that Leo could even get admitted to college at all. No, scratch that. The thing he’s _most_ impressed with is the fact that Leo managed to graduate from high school, period.

He tells Leo as much, on their first day of class together, but Leo just laughs in that painfully obnoxious way of his and says, “My music can’t be boxed in by something as trivial as grades, you know?”

“You say this now, but when you start failing classes don’t come crying to me,” Izumi returns.

“There’s no way that’s going to happen, Sena,” Leo replies cheerfully. He lowers his voice in what’s supposed to be an imitation of Izumi’s voice and continues, still grinning brightly, “ _Not on my watch_ ,” he pitches his voice back to normal, “or something like that, right?”

Izumi rolls his eyes. “As if,” he mutters.

Leo smiles blithely back at him. Izumi looks away, but their hands are still interlinked anyway. It’s going to be okay this time, Izumi thinks—no, _believes_ , because there’s really only ever been one person who’s ever rendered him capable of belief at all. Something settles in the pit of his stomach, heavy and sharp, but it’s not necessarily a bad feeling. No, not a bad one at all.

“Come on,” Izumi says, still not looking at Leo. “We’re going to be late for class.”

Leo doesn’t say anything in response, just keeps walking alongside Izumi. Even without looking at him, Izumi knows he’s still smiling.

He exhales sharply, and keeps his fingers wrapped around Leo’s wrist. If any of the other students mulling about notice, no one says a thing to them. They’re just two boys on the way to their first class of the year, simple and easy and uncomplicated. That’s all there is to it.

-

Most boys, upon graduation from Yumenosaki, usually choose to go straight into fully-fledged idol careers, either going it solo or forming units with the other recent graduates. The reputation of the school really speaks for itself, and most of the third-years will have contracts lined up for them even before they graduate at all.

The number of students who go on to college has increased exponentially in the past decade, but it’s still a small minority of an already small school. After all, there’s not much of a point when you get your careers served up to you on a plate without really trying, and even if you plan on going to a regular college to do something perfectly mundane like—like accountancy, or business, or something along those lines, there are things like entrance exams and interviews and teacher recommendations, and when has anyone in Yumenosaki ever learnt to actually _study_?

Thinking about it logically, it’s so much easier to just plunge straight into the idol world. But then one day, sitting alone together in the middle of an empty classroom after practice Leo turned to him and said, “I think I want go to a music conservatory after I graduate.”

“What?” By that point Izumi hadn’t even been considering college at all; he’d been toying with the idea of doing some modeling again on the side, and whether he should go at it solo or form a new unit, but this—this was coming out of nowhere, as far as he was concerned. “Why?” he asked.

Leo was sitting on one of the tables at the front of the classroom, staring up at the whiteboard that was covered in haphazard scribbles of a new song he was working on. He hummed, twirling the marker in his hand, then shrugged. “Why not?” he said, in his usual flippant way, and Izumi scowled at the back of his head.

“Isn’t it so much easier to just start work right away?” Izumi asked.

“Easier? Why would it be easier?”

“Hold on, don’t just answer a question with another question—”

“But why not?”

Izumi scowled harder, grabbed the nearest projectile he could find (a pencil), and then flung it squarely at Leo. Leo, to his credit, simply leaned gracefully to the side, and the pencil sailed neatly past the side of his head and hit the whiteboard in front of him with a loud _thunk_.

“I don’t understand you,” Izumi said. “You don’t like the idea of school, but you want to go to college? What the hell? That makes no sense. If writing music’s what you want to do, you don’t have to be at a school to do that. Aren’t you already writing and selling music? Do you really want to have some old guy in a bad suit breathing down your neck telling you what or what not to do?”

“You’re awfully worked up, aren’t you, Sena?”

Izumi opened his mouth, then shut it again. Leo still wasn’t looking at him.

“I don’t understand you,” Izumi tried again.

“Don’t you feel how small our world is?” Leo replied.

Izumi blinked. Leo stopped spinning the marker and set it down on a table. He pulled his legs up, sitting cross-legged on the edge of his desk.

“Even outside of class—we don’t really do anything else, do we? Everything’s about our _development as idols_ , and then when we graduate we’re expected to just continue doing the same thing. We train to be idols here, and then we become idols, and then—what?”

“Isn’t that what you signed up for when you entered this school, though?”

“Is that what _you_ signed up for?”

Leo finally turned around then, and Izumi unconsciously held his breath at the look on his face, more serious than Izumi had seen him be in a long time. There was something almost ethereal about the way he looked at moments like these; when he reminded Izumi just how much more there was to him than first meets the eye.

“I want to expand my horizons,” Leo said, earnestly. “I want to learn as much about music as I can.”

“And you think going to college is the best way to do that?”

Leo shrugged.

“It’s a start,” he said, simply, and smiled.

-

So Leo applied to music schools, found one as far away from home as possible and got admitted in a heartbeat.

It wasn’t even a question for Izumi. He applied to the same school without even thinking about it at all.

And so they graduated, and spent the summer getting their things in order, and now here they are, four hours from home and Yumenosaki and everything they once knew.

-

They find an apartment together, because it’s actually cheaper than student accommodation and comes without the drunk idiots stumbling along the hallways in the middle of the night or late night parties downstairs when Izumi’s trying to get some fucking sleep. It’s convenience, or so Izumi tells himself. He’s just doing the right thing and sparing everyone else the burden of having to deal with Leo’s random fits of inspiration. Forget graduating from high school, Izumi’s most impressed that Leo managed to actually survive till adulthood without accidentally maiming himself permanently at some point.

The apartment itself is nice. It’s small and slightly cramped, but the heating works, and it doesn’t smell like the previous tenant died of old age in the living room surrounded by twenty cats, and frankly that’s good enough for Izumi. Neither of them are much for decorating, so most of their furniture is simple and practical: tables, chairs, silverware, a fridge, a whiteboard for Leo so he doesn’t end up scribbling all over the walls and pissing off their landlord.

They share a bedroom. It’s not a big deal.

The spare room has an old secondhand keyboard they found at a thrift store, and then a shelf full of blank staff paper and old compositions, cassette tapes and CD’s haphazardly piled up onto each other. There’s a desk that’s rarely ever used, and then cushions and blankets thrown over the floor in deceptively strategic positions.

It’s Leo’s private space. It feels strange for Izumi to be intruding like this, but—but they’re living together now, and. And they’re. They’re whatever it is that they are.

(It’s not a big deal.)

They’re regular students. They go to class in the morning, and then they come home in the evening completely exhausted. Izumi signs up for tennis again. Leo continues with archery. There’s still homework and essays, which Izumi tries to finish on time and which Leo completely ignores. They have to pay rent and buy groceries and trudge to the nearest convenience store at seven in the morning when they run out of toothpaste, and it’s mundane and boring and a world away from home, and Izumi realizes, abruptly, that this is exactly what Leo meant by ‘expanding horizons’.

Because there’s no way they would’ve had this back home, back in that same place with the exact same people they’d gone to school with, the exact same faces and the exact same songs. It would’ve been stable and peaceful and boring as _fuck,_ and even though Izumi would rather eat his left shoe than admit it, he grudgingly admits that Leo was, unsurprisingly, right all along.

-

Izumi has never once thought that living with Leo would be _easy_ , but honestly, no one ever told him it would be this hard either.

Case in point: he wakes up bleary-eyed in the middle of the night one day, and when he rolls over he realizes the side of the bed usually occupied by Leo is empty. And cold.

He gets up slowly, rubs his eyes until he feels marginally more awake, then fumbles for the light switch before shuffling out of the bedroom. The living room lights are off, as is the kitchen. There’s only one other room in their apartment, and when he pushes the door of the spare room open he isn’t surprised at all to see Leo sitting on the floor, leaning back against one of the walls with his eyes closed as he listens to music on an iPod. He almost looks like he’s asleep, but his fingers, idly tapping out a beat on his knee, give him away.

“It’s two in the morning, you moron,” Izumi says, then realizes belatedly that Leo can’t hear him. He scowls, steps forward, and then kneels down so that he’s eye-level with Leo. Leo still doesn’t make any indication that he’s noticed Izumi’s presence. Izumi scowls harder, and then plucks Leo’s earphones away. The tinny music continues blaring softly from it, and even at that volume Izumi still manages to recognize it as one of Leo’s older songs, back from when they were still first years in high school.

Slowly, Leo opens his eyes, blinking at Izumi.

“It’s late,” Izumi says.

“My music doesn’t care what time it is,” Leo says, but even though he’s smiling it’s immediately obvious how tired he is. There are dark circles under his eyes, and Izumi is struck all over again with just how hard Leo works, even though he never really shows it.

Sighing, he sits down next to Leo, joins him on the floor surrounded by scattered sheet music. He hands Leo one side of his headphones, and then puts the other side in his ear. Music washes over him immediately, calming and quiet.

“You’re an idiot,” Izumi says.

Gently, Leo rests his head on Izumi’s shoulder.

Izumi closes his eyes.

-

They go back to visit Yumenosaki over the winter break. Arashi’s the leader of Knights now, and there are new first years too. Not much of a knight when the king’s graduated, Izumi thinks privately, but the underclassmen are doing well, and Leo’s practically brimming with excitement when he talks to them again.

Izumi’s not sure if any of them know that he and Leo are—together. He thinks Arashi probably knows, but apart from not-so-subtle sidelong glances he doesn’t say anything about it, and none of the other underclassmen treat them any differently.

It occurs to him that he’s been worrying about it, subconsciously, somewhere deep down inside of him. He’s changed since he left this school—he’s been anxious about how he’d feel, coming back here again. The person he is today isn’t the same person he was in high school; he hadn’t been happy back then, and he’s—well, he’s still not sure if he’d consider himself a happy person now, but he’s happi _er_. That much he can say for sure. It feels like he’d been in a tunnel for the longest time, surrounded only by darkness with the slightest hint of light, and only recently has he finally emerged from the other side.

He looks at Leo, smiling and laughing and picking on Tsukasa with unbridled glee, and he realizes Leo’s missed this. He’s missed his Knights. He watches Leo interacting with Tsukasa, with Arashi and with Ritsu, and he stands on the edge of them, just looking.

But then Leo turns around, and he looks at Izumi, and he smiles.

“What are you doing spacing out like that, Sena?” he says.

Izumi blinks, and then scowls.

“I wasn’t,” he says. “Stupid king.”

Leo grins back at him, and Izumi steps forward to join his friends.

-

Later, much later, when it’s nearing the end of the day and everyone has gone home, Izumi finds himself standing in the middle of an empty classroom, exactly the same as the one from a year ago. Except everything is completely different now.

He thinks about a year ago, sitting in this classroom, lost and unsure. He remembers a time even further back, the DDD fiasco, Leo’s absence from school, and then even earlier than that: the first time they met, the first time Leo smiled at him and said, “You have a really pretty voice, don’t you? I love it!”

He feels Leo approach from behind, rests his chin on Izumi’s shoulder.

“Sena?” Leo says.

Izumi doesn’t move, but he feels Leo reach for his hand, their fingers intertwining.

“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> writing for izumi was really challenging because i think his characterization within lionheart vs his in-game characterization has a lot of differences so for the purposes of this fic i've mostly stuck to the former... but having to write within his perspective was also difficult for me because i feel like he's not the kind to express his emotions a lot (even though there's a whole storm of them going on on the inside) + he's not very honest with himself so i ended up trying to do this.....subtle under-the-surface emotion thing going on in this fic idk man i make bad decisions
> 
> to be quite honest i'm not very familiar with knights so i apologize if this ends up feeling off for both izumi and leo but i tried!!!! i'm sorry!!!!! i hope you guys liked it anyway!!!!! sorry for all the enstars fic!!!!!!!!!!


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